Lightning Strikes

As the president and C.E.O. of AMC Networks, which now operates AMC, WE tv, IFC Films, and the Sundance Channel, Joshua Sapan—sixty-two, tall and lanky, with bushy brows—has amassed a pile of successes: “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” (AMC); “Top of the Lake” (Sundance); “Portlandia” (IFC); “Braxton Family Values” (WE). But he also collects a lot of what you might call garbage.

“Some of my crap,” he said recently, gesturing around his dim, cluttered office, across from Penn Station. “I arranged with art schools that I could go on locker-cleanup day. I went with a moving van. At the Art Students League, things were in Hefty bags.” Sapan glanced lovingly at a painting, hanging above a television, of an American flag to which toy soldiers had been glued (zero dollars, reclaimed at Parsons). “I’ve done dumpster diving, too, but it’s not as abundant,” he added.

According to a proxy filed with the S.E.C., Sapan’s 2012 pay package amounted to $8.9 million, including stock awards—more than enough to buy art in Chelsea. But his collecting has little to do with investment. In 2007, he auctioned off most of what he calls his “discarded art” to benefit Cable Positive, an AIDS non-profit founded by TV executives. “I really do have grandiose notions that if I collect something I’m going to emancipate it and, in addition, save it from literally being garbage, so therefore it’s recycling, and fundamentally ecological,” he said.

Anyway, he explained, the discarded-art phase was behind him. “I’m a little bit of a sequential collector—I go through obsessions.” These have included early TV sets and radios, umbrellas, outdated globes, books with jackets designed by Alvin Lustig, and historical panoramic group photographs (the Anti-Saloon League of America, the Midget Swing Review), which are being published in a book this week. One such image hung behind his desk: the 1958 second-grade class of P.S. 187, with Sapan, in the back row, sticking out his tongue.

Sapan grew up in Brooklyn and Queens; his father worked in advertising, and his mother was an Off Off Broadway actress. He majored in communications at the University of Wisconsin (“I squeezed four years into seven”), then made money driving around Midwestern colleges in a Rambler station wagon, screening movies (“ ‘Reefer Madness’ was a killer”). He later worked as a labor-union organizer in the nursing-home industry, and produced medical television.

“Isn’t this exquisite?” he said of a knee-high rusty metal pole, wedged in a corner, the top of which was decorated with two blue glass orbs. It was an example of one of his recent acquisitive obsessions: lightning rods. Sapan found his first one in an antique store in New Jersey and didn’t know what it was. “I’d never seen anything like it, so I bought it,” he said. He began scouring eBay for rods, and publishing ads in farm-association journals. “You would think that people basically just want to sell stuff, but instead they acted like I was invading. It’s a crusty scene.”

Sapan now has the largest lightning-rod collection in the world—more than a hundred rods, from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century—displayed on the roof of his Upper West Side penthouse, outside his place on Shelter Island, and at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia. Compared with antique weathervanes, which he said can cost “up to a few million,” lightning rods are cheap (less than eight hundred dollars), because they were generally mass-produced.

Sapan slung a backpack over his shoulder and headed out to the subway. “See you mañana!” he yelled to his secretary, who sat beneath a quote, painted on the wall, from “The Producers”: “Shut up, I’m having a rhetorical conversation.”

He was greeted at the door of his surprisingly spare apartment by Giorgio Armani, a rescue cat, and Baba Ghanouj, a rescue dog. “We moved in about a year ago, and it’s sort of denuded of everything,” he said, a bit ruefully. “My wife”—Ann Foley, a former Showtime executive—“had the predisposition.” On the roof, he gave a tour of the few lightning rods he’d been permitted.

“I was once on a boat in New York Harbor that was hit by lightning,” he recalled. “It was a corporate-retreat-ish meeting that I’d organized. But when we got out there it got bad, and—big crack—we lost navigation. The Coast Guard had to come! It was a freaky moment, but the lightning rod, it did its job.” ♦